A few months ago, one of my friends went through a difficult time. He had a series of personal and professional setbacks happening simultaneously, and I spent some time during these days with him to support him and give him advice.
Fast forward to today, he’s doing incredibly well, or as he would say, he’s back! We had dinner together last night with a couple of other friends, where he talked between laughs how terrible that time of his life was, and how valuable was the advice that I gave him to get out of it. I’m not one to push advice down other people’s throat, but since this helped him, I believe it might help others so then it might be useful to share.
This advice can be useful for those going through periods of extreme stress induced by a battery of bad news, which is what my friend was going through, and what I went through a few months before him when I was closing Neos and breaking up with my girlfriend. It is only because of this experience that I had the hindsight necessary to give him advice. As he jokingly said at the dinner:“This dude has the audacity to say: I think I understand you, and I think this is what you should do!”. Luckily I was correct!
The advice that I gave him was to divide his reaction into two sequential steps: getting emotional, and getting pragmatic.
The first step is to acknowledge that life can get hard sometimes, and when a series of bad things occur, you should not pretend to be emotionally immune to them. If you do not address the emotional aspect of these events, these emotions will be bottled up inside of you, hampering your ability to make rational decisions moving forward. Thus, the first thing I advised him to do was to cry. Cry for as long as you need. One hour, one day, one week... just cry until you feel like you’ve let everything out. Feel entitled to be emotional, and claim that right. At some point, you will get tired of crying, and you will be able to move on into the next step.
Once you’ve let it all out, you will feel a sense of relief. Your emotions will have been processed, and you will be able to better understand them, and as a result, understand yourself. Now without this cloud of unprocessed emotions over your head, you will be able to see the reality of the situation much more clearly, and this is where the next step of the plan begins. With this clarity, you can begin to think rationally about your situation, create a plan to change it, and start executing upon such plan which will help you once again to take the reins of your life. You can get pragmatic.
In summary, if you’re going through difficult times, you can try this approach. Get emotional, allow yourself to be vulnerable and cry to process the feelings that are not letting you think straight; and then get pragmatic, make a plan with the obtained clarity of mind to get your life back on track and start executing. No guarantees that it will work, but worth a try.